Entergy Louisiana restores power to nearly all customers after 320,000 hit by Hurricane Delta

In the wake of the category 2 Hurricane Delta, Entergy Louisiana restored power to all customers who could safely receive it last week, bringing more than half a million people impacted by the storm back online.

Delta took out power for approximately 320,000 Entergy Louisiana customers at its height, amid heavy rain and high winds. A team of around 9,000 quickly went to work, managing to restore power to 90 percent of those affected within three days. The storm was the latest to wreak devastation in the state, but hardly the first.

“Even though some communities are still recovering from Hurricane Laura, the support our customers have shown to the thousands of men and women restoring power following Hurricane Delta was truly humbling and inspiring,” Phillip May, Entergy Louisiana president and CEO, said. “I can’t say it enough: Getting the lights back on following devastating hurricanes is what we do. It’s who we are. We’ll always be there for our communities, no matter the storm. The people of Louisiana have always been there for us, and we’re glad we could be there for them when they needed us most.”

Laura was a devastating category four hurricane that slammed Louisiana at the end of August. It killed at least 42 people and caused approximately $14 billion of damages in Louisiana and Texas. Along the way, it also chewed up nearly 2,000 of Entergy’s transmission structures in Louisiana and Texas, prompting a massive rebuild effort that had finished only shortly before Delta swept the scene.

Laura decimated more than 14,000 distribution poles, 4,800 transformers, 30,000 spans of distribution wire, 30,000 crossarms, 1,900 transmission structures, 300 substations and 225 transmission lines. The damage was so extensive that vast portions of the underlying transmission system required a nearly complete rebuild — an effort estimated to cost somewhere between $1.5 billion and $1.7 billion. Entergy Louisiana and Entergy Texas bore most of those costs.

“We are proud of the thousands of men and women who are working tirelessly to safely restore power for our customers,” Rod West, Entergy Utility Group president, said. “Hurricane Laura inflicted catastrophic damage on Entergy’s transmission and distribution systems that resulted in approximately 600,000 outages at its peak and impacted more than 900,000 customers in total.”

Delta ended up striking less than 15 miles east of where Laura crashed into the state. In this regard, Delta proved to be a test of those new structures — one for which they held firm. This allowed for rather quick restoration efforts.